“Immunotherapy works in many different cancer types, but the same approach has yielded only a 10% success rate in glioblastoma,” said Filippo Veglia, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Genome Regulation and Cell Signaling Program at the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center at The Wistar Institute and senior author of the study.
“Our study shows that combination therapy is paramount to making immunotherapy work for glioblastoma patients. We need to target two different populations of cells.”
Two barriers to an immune attack
Glioblastoma is the most aggressive and deadly primary brain cancer in adults. Immunotherapies that have transformed care for other cancers have largely failed against it, in part because glioblastoma tumors are packed with myeloid cells—immune cells that, inside the tumor, suppress the immune system by shutting down nearby T cells that would otherwise attack the cancer.